We’d been planning the move from Hawaii to Sweden for a long time. Because the Swedish immigration authorities are ridiculously overburdened, the processing times for residency permits is counted in years, even if you’re married to a Swede who wants to move back home. There are entire web forums dedicated to the trials and tribulations of people trying to navigate the hurdles associated with moving (back) to Sweden. The rules about how this is supposed to work might have been reasonable when they were put in place, but are not when the wait time is 18-24 months, you don’t know when your application will be processed, and, according to the rules, your application will be denied if you don’t show that you have a clear intent to move soon after your application is approved.

So you have to show that you’re ready to move with something like a month’s notice at some unknown point in time 18-24 months into the future. Works great for planning. The absurdity continues with the fact that unless you show that you have a place to live in Sweden set up, you run the risk of a denial because not having it indicates that you do not have intent to move. The result is that people have to buy or rent homes years in advance of needing them.

Our situation was slightly better than it could have been since we are in a long-term relationship and I’m a Swedish citizen, which gets rid of the rule that you have to show that you have an income (after the move) sufficient to take care of your family.

Anyway, there are small signs that politicians have realized that if they want Swedes to move back to Sweden, they need to make this easier. On the other hand, the immigration debate is dominated by the right wing yelling about how it needs to be harder, not easier, to immigrate to Sweden. They swear up and down that of course they don’t mean that it should be harder for Swedes to move to Sweden, only those … “other people.”

We had set a target of July 2023 for the move and applied for Kathy’s residency permit in December 2021. For a long time nothing happened but by fall of 2022 we were seriously scanning the housing market in Sundsvall, where I grew up. We did not want to rent something temporary given the extreme pain of moving twice, but I had a good idea of the places we’d want to live and the kind of house we wanted, so we started scanning for houses for sale. By winter we had the local representatives (ie my parents and my brother) attend some showings, and by March we put in our first bid.

The housing market was stone cold, I mean ice, ice, cold. The high interest rates meant that no one was buying, and few people were selling and most of those who were had not mentally adjusted to the fact that prices had dropped significantly over the past year. There was a lot of houses sitting on the market and the sellers refusing any bids in what we considered reasonable. By May we were getting a bit nervous but finally reached a deal on the house below in the middle of May with a move-in date at the end of July.

Our new home.

This house is nicely situated in a small residential area just outside of Sundsvall, but in walking distance (not a short walk, though) to the kids preschool and schools. And the garage should be sufficient for projects. It was built in 2020 so should be up to energy efficiency standards, but the drawback is that for some reasons new houses around here have almost no storage space so while the living space is a bit larger than our house in Hawaii, the total space is much less (even with that garage). They must not be very materialistic here in Sweden…

Luckily we could give power of attorney to my parents to sign the purchase contract, but what we could not do is pay for the house remotely. (Since we did not have any income in Sweden, no one would give us a mortgage. Luckily we were able to pay cash.) Money laundering and know-your-customer laws are very strict in Sweden so the bank refused to transfer the funds without us appearing in person. At least they agreed to transfer the earnest money remotely, but even then I had to show them a bunch of paperwork as evidence that the funds were above board. This created a very tight schedule where our stuff would get packed up and the container leave on July 22, the house get cleaned on July 23, the sale close on July 24, we’d fly out to Sweden on July 25, arrive July 27, and finally appear in person to close the purchase on July 28. What could possibly go wrong?

Amazingly enough, for all intents and purposes, it worked. We were pretty beat after the purchase was finalized on July 28, though.

One significant stressor was that all our belongings, including the minivan and motorcycle, was going to get packed into one 40-foot container and then go all the way to Sweden. The thing is, it’s really difficult to judge how much stuff you have before it’s all in boxes, and it’s also pretty difficult then judge exactly how efficiently that can get packed in boxes and packed into a container. The movers did not impress, they came over from Honolulu and did not have all the normal equipment you associate with a bunch of movers, and did not seem that concerned with packing stuff tightly into the container. At some point I realized they were not aware that the minivan was also going into the container. That takes up basically half the space, so is kind of important to be aware of. I ended up measuring off the distance and putting a big tape mark in the container, and then another tape mark so the motorcycle would fit, and we watched the belongings get closer and closer to that mark.

The container being packed. As you can see in there, it’s not exactly just a bunch of boxes…

The good thing about putting the car inside the container, unlike if you ship it separately. is that you can fill it up with stuff. A bunch of the most fragile and expensive boxes I packed into the car myself, and we fully utilized that volume, including the front passenger seat and the roof rack. We had also prepared a list of “stuff that will only go if there’s room”.

All I can say is that we were lucky that we’d been getting rid of stuff before the move, because there was no. more. room. (Granted, better boxing and packing higher into the container could have been done, but it’s not like there was time to pull out a container-worth of stuff into the driveway and start repacking.)

We waved goodbye to our container on July 22. From now on we’d have what we had in our suitcases until the container arrived. We watched it slowly snake its way around the world on the container tracking websites, until it showed up on … December 6, 4.5 months later.

I had impressed upon the destination company that there was a car in the container and there was no way to drive it off here, but they assured me things were under control. The original plan was to transport the container door to door, to minimize risk of damage, but due to the need for getting the car out and the fact that getting a 40-ft container truck up to our house might be a tad difficult (especially getting it turned around], they ended up repacking it after it came through customs in Stockholm.

Even after driving the car onto the smaller truck, it seemed the moving crew hadn’t fully thought through how to get it off. They had thrown in two ramps, but they were different length and were not sturdy enough to take the weight of the car by themselves. Add to that the fact that the Pacifica has a fairly low ground clearance and the first problem getting it off was that the ramps were just too steep for the car to make it onto them without scraping the bottom (where the battery is).

The first attempt at getting the car off. Note the entirely sketchy reinforcements under the ramps.

This did not work, there’s not enough ground clearance to avoid the edge of the ramp cutting the underbody of the car.

After attempting to reposition the truck, we regrouped. The driveway in front of the garage slopes significantly down from the road, so by putting the truck in the driveway and the ramps out onto the road, we could minimize the angle enough to avoid scraping the underbody.

To minimize the slope of the ramps, the truck was parked in our sloping driveway, its suspension dropped as much as possible, and the ramps extended onto the road.

This finally worked. But now the car, with very much summer tires, was sitting at the top of the snow-covered driveway. Luckily it was a straight shot to roll into the garage, because he could not have stopped if it wasn’t. After almost 2 hours of trying, we had the car in the garage.

Kathy made a video of the entire process that you may enjoy:

After that, the exciting stuff was over and they got the trailer that had all the household goods unloaded in a few hours. But they did wonder what in the world they were thinking when packing the container. They made some comment like “normally you want to pack stuff in boxes”…

Anyway, after living without our stuff for over four months (although we’d bought some furniture since we didn’t have much of that in the container) we could now really move in. The kids were sure very excited to finally have all their toys back!

Next post will be about the airplane situation. Big news on that front!